ot afraid to attack nests from which
the hatching birds have been frightened away by men engaged in
gathering eggs only a few yards off. With incredible dexterity it
pecks a hole in the eggs and sucks their contents. If speed is
necessary, this takes place so quickly and out of so many eggs in
succession that it sometimes has to stand without moving, unable to
fly further until it has thrown up what it had swallowed. The skua
in this way commonly takes part in the plundering of every eider
island. The walrus-hunters are very much embittered against the bird
on account of this intrusion on their industry, and kill it whenever
they can. The whalers called it "struntjaeger"--refuse-hunter--because
they believed that it hunted gulls in order to make them void their
excrements which "struntjaegeren" was said to devour as a luxury.

[Illustration:
A. THE COMMON SKUA. Swedish, Labben, (Lestris parasitica, L.)
B. BUFFON'S SKUA. Swedish, Fjellabben. (Lestris Buffonii, Boie.)
C. THE POMARINE SKUA. Swedish, Bredstjertade Labben
(Lestris pomarina. Tem.) ]

The skua breeds upon low, unsheltered, often water-drenched
headlands and islands, where it lays one or two eggs on the bare
ground, often without trace of a nest. The eggs are so like the
ground that it is only with difficulty that they can be found. The
male remains in the neighbourhood of the nest during the hatching
season. If a man, or an animal which the bird considers dangerous,
approaches the eggs, the pair endeavour to draw attention from them
by removing from the nest, creeping on the ground and flapping their
wings in the most pitiful way. The bird thus acts with great skill a
veritable comedy, but takes good care that it is not caught.

As is well known, we know only two varieties of colour in this bird,
a self-coloured brown, and a brown on the upper part of the body
with white below. Of these I have only once in the Arctic regions
seen the self-coloured variety, viz. at Bell Sound in 1858. All the
hundreds of skuas which I have seen, besides, have had the throat
and lower part of the body coloured white.

This bird is very common on Spitzbergen and Novaya Zemlya. Yet
perhaps it scarcely breeds on the north part of North-East Land.
Along with the bird now described there occur, though sparingly, two
others:--_bredstjertade labben_, the Pomarine skua (_Lestris
pomarina_, Tem.) and _fjellalbben_, Buffon's skua (_Lestris
Buffonii_, Boie). The latter is distinguish